The Binary Circumstance

From Wired Science:

What exactly do John McCain and Barack Obama know about science?

That’s what the folks behind Science Debate 2008 want to know, and to find out, they’ve developed 14 questions they sent to the candidates and hope to discuss with them at a science-only debate. The questions cover innovation, climate change, energy, genetics, space, and health, among other topics.

I loved this comment.

Given the nature of presidential politics and the meatiness of the questions, we’d be happy if the candidates answered even one of them with more than a platitude.

Check out the article for the questions.

In celebration of July 4th, I’d add another question under the category of freedom: We fought the Revolutionary War to stop the King of England from forcing his will on us at the point of a gun and stealing our money. What scientific evidence do you have to support your belief that politicians have a “right” to use guns to force their will on others and steal the fruits of their labor? Isn’t that just slavery all over again?

Since I just wrote about StarGaze which features pictures from the Hubble space telescope, I enjoyed this article about the Hubble’s most recent revelation.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter — the protons and neutrons that make up atoms — but there also is an even larger amount of invisible “dark” matter.

Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

It’s amazing what science continues to reveal about our universe. No religion has ever built anything like the Hubble telescope.

If you would like to get your mind off of self-important politicians and the nonsense that they spout to win elections, I would highly recommend StarGaze: Hubble’s View of the Universe, a DVD that consists of awesome pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope set to music.

I found it necessary to watch it twice, because when the subtitles are displayed, I wasn’t focused on the pictures. But to really see the pictures in their full glory, it helps to turn off the subtitles. The subtitles have a lot of interesting information in them, so they are well worth reading. The are available in several languages.

The main menu didn’t come up when the DVD started playing. I didn’t realize that there’s also a voice-over narration on the DVD which allows you to see the pictures without having to read subtitles. To select the voice narration, I had to do into the audio selection menu, selecting “English narration” from the subtitle menu just gave me subtitles. I thought this was a shortcoming of the DVD.

The film is only about 50 minutes long and gazing at the universe through Hubble’s eyes really puts everything that happens on this planet into perspective.

It also makes you wonder how anybody could think that the Biblical story of creation has any truth to it. If the Hubble is collecting light from billions of years ago, how could the universe have been created just a few thousand years ago? When you see on the unfathomable vastness of the Universe, how could any human think the whole thing was built for him?

The film is available from Netflix:

NASA’s Hubble Telescope focuses its lens on amazing celestial images in this captivating documentary, which puts viewers in the astronomer’s seat. The star of the film is Hubble’s astounding footage of galaxies, supernovae, stars, planets, gaseous clouds, nebulae and other out-of-this-world sights, accompanied by a narrative detailing Hubble’s history and NASA’s mission to use the telescope for documenting cosmic events and objects.

It can also be purchased from Amazon.com.

I’m still in the process of researching both the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (EPR Paradox) as well as Bell’s Theorem in an effort to understand their implications for Objectivism as well as the binary circumstance or the binary nature of existence.

Albert Einstein argued that quantum mechanics was an incomplete theory and that certain hidden variables were required to fully understand quantum reality.

Niels Bohr argued that quantum mechanics was a complete theory and there were no hidden variables.

The ongoing discussion has been called the Bohr-Einstein debates.

Whether the hidden variables exist or not is a binary circumstance.

I plan to expand upon this post as I learn more about the subject. I learned some of the basics in college physics thirty years ago and have read more about it since then. It’s all so mind-boggling that I doubt I could ever fully understand it. It is clear that many Nobel Prize winners are still trying to figure it all out.

Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating subject. More interesting than the election or any other current events to me. I’ve said just about everything I have to say about politics and government and I’m tired of repeating myself. I’m looking for new subjects to think about.

Bell’s Theorem and Locality

Bell’s Theorem says that reality is non-local. [1,230] More specifically it says that “No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.” [Wikipedia]

There are challenges to Bell’s Theorem but experiments have supported it so far.

I have a problem with the definition of non-locality. “Spooky action at a distance,” says that measurement of a property of one electron can change another electron instantly at any distance, even millions of miles away. While this action is called non-local, I would call it absolute locality or hyper locality. It seems that you must do away with time and space, as if the two particles in question occupied the same point, even though the experimenters perceive them (and measure them) to be a great distance from each other.

If information is communicated instantly, that means no time can elapse. How can information go from point A to point B? To travel from one point in space to another implies a lapse of time, unless point A and point B occupy the same point in space.

Oddly, when physicists talk of locality, the are talking about one object impacting another even though they may be at some distance. An example would be the sun shining on earth or the earth’s gravity pulling on the moon. These actions are called local even when the action occurs over time and through space. If that’s local, shouldn’t instant communication require and even greater locality, an “absolute” locality?

When a scientist says, “A universe that displays local phenomena built upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell’s proof,” [1,230] it calls into question what is really local and what isn’t.

If there is communication, that is connection, which makes it local. There is a relationship where one electron can effect others instantly. To my mind that is not “non-local,” it is absolute locality.

How can an object influence another which is millions of miles away instantly? We’re not just talking about traveling faster than the speed of light, which Einstein said was impossible, we’re talking about not traveling at all because traveling requires time and instant communication by definition can’t require time.

Welcome to the world of Bell’s Theorem and Quantum Mechanics.

Notes
1. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Nick Herbert. New York: Anchor Books (1985)